David Seymour on Auckland Housing: Debate 'Highly Politicised'

He believed planning should be left alone while focus is put on speeding up consenting and addressing other roadblocks. “So have we contributed to it? Yeah, sure. We’ve opposed these heavy-handed effects, but ultimately, we didn’t start them. We’ve pushed them back at various times.” Seymour said upcoming changes to the current intensification plan – called Plan Change 120 – will be a “solution designed to mediate a number of competing interests”, but won’t divulge details to be “respectful of my colleagues and [to let] them work through their own processes”. The current plan, which was open to public submissions until last month, would enable two million potential homes to be developed (though this doesn’t mean they will all be built) in Auckland, with greater density and building heights in some inner-city suburbs, particularly around transport centres. “There’s aspects that everyone agrees on, right? So like train stations, and to some extent, corridors. No one’s really disagreeing about that,” Seymour said. “What I find, for as long as I’ve represented Epsom, we’ve polled this extensively, people in Epsom are not anti-intensification, but when you say, ‘oh, we’re going to have a 50m tower in the middle of a whole lot of single-family homes looking into everyone’s backyards and their swing sets and their pools’, they say, ‘well, why would you do that’? “If you say, ‘well the area around that train station over there is going to go to seven storeys, and then a block out it’s going to go to four storeys and then a block back from that is going to be two storeys’, and they say, ‘oh, okay, so there’s going to be sort of a bit of a pyramid around the train station’. People say, ‘well, that sounds like London’.” The ‘great tragedy’ The previous Plan Change 78 would have incorporated Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS), introduced under Labour and initially supported by National, into planning. The MDRS is well known for the ‘3x3’ rule of generally allowing three dwellings of three storeys on sections. Seymour was among those who rallied against the MDRS, which he has said was a “one-size-fits-all” approach to intensification. As opposition grew to those rules, National changed its policy to allow councils to opt out of the MDRS if they could zone for more housing in other ways. Last year, the coalition Government allowed Auckland to withdraw Plan Change 78, leading to Plan Change 120. Seymour said the “great tragedy” had been that after “four years of Wellington intervening in the Auckland planning policies”, it “hasn’t actually had any effect yet”. “Plan Change 78 barely or didn’t come into effect, so that was the whole 2021 gambit, which was crazy. Now we’ve had Plan Change 120, which appears will be changed.” He said that if, following the Auckland Unitary Plan passing in 2016, there had been more emphasis placed on improving consent times and infrastructure connections, “then we could probably actually be quite a long way ahead in terms of housing supply than where we are now”. “That’s the great frustration, and the other thing about it is that these series of sort of symbolic clashes have highly politicised the issue.” For example, he said if someone doesn’t appear to support enabling two million houses, as Plan Change 120 requires, there is outrage. “You end up having this kind of symbolic debate rather than a practical debate of how do you actually make it easier to build more houses faster and cheaper, which is what people actually need. I just shake my head at the whole thing.” Having a “rational debate” was possible, he said, “but we just haven’t because it’s all been about, ‘we’re going to make all of Auckland 3x3’”. “It’s almost like the display of political force is the point of it. It hasn’t actually led to any more homes getting built.” On housing affordability, Seymour said he would like to see house price to income ratios come down. “Whether or not that’s achieved by incomes going up or house prices going down is an argument. I’ve always said, ‘look, the truth is, politicians can’t control it’.” That’s because, he said, it takes too long for MPs’ actions to impact the market. “The lead time for politicians to influence that, and then those houses have to actually be built, and they’ve got to go to market, and people got to rebalance supply and demand, then that affects prices. “That’s not something that you can actually do. I think what we should be doing is just have good policy. If someone can build something, and it’s not going to severely disadvantage what someone else already has, let them build it.” He said Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk has made progress, like with changes to building material regulations.